It’s possible that people can recover from trauma, I know because I help people do it every day.
It’s becoming more known within the scientific community that trauma isn’t an event that happened to you in your past, but rather memories that are stored within a separate part of your brain than other memories, where your brain relives them as if they’re still happening to you right now.(1) I’ve said this for a while now, trauma isn’t the event. It’s you and your body’s response to the event to keep you alive, to keep you safe, and sometimes that means for long periods of time like months, years, or even decades. What the general public seems to still not be aware of is how trauma shows up and manifests itself within their bodies. It’s the constant stiffness in your shoulders, the inability to be still for any period of time, the muscle through-it mentality, the emotional check out at family functions, not being able to ever complete a project you started, knowing what makes you feel happiness, and so so so much more. Trauma is linked to auto-immune disorders, addiction, obesity, anxiety, depression, burnout, and the list goes on. Trauma is an epidemic, but trauma is also something that can be healed, that we can recover from, and my Trauma Recovery Certification program teaches just that.
Trauma is an epidemic, but trauma is also something that can be healed.
70% of adults in the U.S. have experienced some type of traumatic event at least once in their lives.(2) That’s over 200 million people. But still, when you think of someone who’s experienced trauma, the symptoms that are almost always referred to are flashbacks, nightmares, panic, hypervigilance, and maybe angry or irrational emotional outbursts. While those are all important and valid symptoms of trauma, they only tell half of the story.
What about those who have no voice? Who morph into the wants and needs of everyone around them and has lost all sense of who they are and what their own wants and needs are? What about the person who on the outside looks like they have everything together, a career, a life partner, maybe kids, but lacks any and all types of real feeling, they just go through the motions of their life? Or also the person who struggles with addiction, because the reality of their thoughts and life are too much to carry?
We have to break the cycle of feeling like pain is something we have to brush ourselves off from, that it’s inconvenient and a waste of time, that it isn’t valid. Trauma, pain, adversity, whichever word you’d like to use, is part of the human experience. Our society and culture have taught us that what we feel isn’t valid, that if it isn’t helping or being productive, then it needs to be silenced.
We have to break the cycle of feeling like pain is something we have to brush ourselves off from.
I’m here to tell you, that the cycle can be broken. We can begin to heal ourselves, and communities one by one and allow the effects to ripple out for generations.
What does healing need?
Empathy
Compassion
A Witness
Non-Judgment
Awareness
Empathy is being able to see someone else’s experience from their eyes as if you were the one experiencing it. Trying to see and feel what someone is going through from a place of curiosity is essential for them to feel heard. When we’re able to come from a place of genuinely wanting to know their experience it creates a foundation of both safety and respect.
Compassion is the sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it.(3) Compassion is the key ingredient to everything. Introducing compassion into any struggle or adversity you face, or witness someone else facing, is setting the foundation for a real and genuine facilitation of healing.
When someone comes to you with something that they’re struggling with or that’s bothering them, unless they ask you for advice or help, chances are they need a witness. To be a witness is to hold space for someone and the experience they’re having in its entirety, without judgment. There aren’t enough spaces in this world where someone has the opportunity to open up and share their thoughts, feelings, and emotions, with someone who has no agenda, doesn’t try to fix it, and allows them to put their pain and burdens down, even if just for a little bit.
Judgment is the destroyer of confidence and the punisher of emotions. As a society, we’re judged now more than we ever have been before. As women, we’re taught from a young age to not dress a certain way to not draw unwanted attention, we’re told we’re not supposed to be angry, and we’re supposed to do it all with a smile on our faces. No negative emotions are allowed here! So creating a space where whatever it is that that person is experiencing is allowed, and it’s valid and human to feel that way, is critical in that person’s journey of healing.
As the first four are introduced and become familiar, room gets created within the person. It’s not that the trauma or the memories go away, but there’s room around them for them to be able to have empathy and compassion, be a witness, and withhold judgment for themselves. Awareness is the ability to see themselves as if they were you and be able to show all of these beautiful things to themselves and allow the experience they’re having in it’s entirety. It’s being able to witness their anxiety and being able to say, “I’m feeling anxious,” vs “I’m anxious.”
In my Trauma Recovery Certification program, you not only learn how to do the above steps, but also what it truly means to experience trauma and the symptoms that form, how it can show up in you and those around you, the different types of trauma like childhood trauma, Interconnected trauma, Inherited trauma, and so much more. We dig deep in live classes around the different topics, share stories and experiences, and build a community of like-minded people who all want the same thing.
If you feel like learning more about trauma, what it means to heal and recover, and how to be a cycle breaker within your life, please reach out to me to learn more.
Thank you for being on this journey with me.
